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Ortho doc's wet dream

I dragged the old CR250 out of the corner of the garage last weekend. It probably hadn't been started in two years. I dumped in a splash of fresh gas and it started on about the eighth kick. I rode around the neighborhood, did a couple wheelies, and put it back in hibernation.

Crash Test Dummy

First time I have logged in here in a long time. I was also caught up in the other social media sites. As of about 3 weeks ago though, I have removed myself from all of them. (I still have a dormant twitter just to test things for a website I manage.)

As for riding, nope, no more dirt for me. As many of you who were connected with me on Facebook know, I traded my old CRF450 for a vintage flat track bike a few years back and restored it. Then I promptly sold it for a wad of cash to finance a new camera and a couple other toys.

Now I have a nice spot in the country with a couple of acres and may eventually get a TTR or something similar to play with in the backyard. Until then, just waiting for warm weather to get out the old sled to go play on the backroads. 1977 KZ650... first need to put a clutch in it.

Admin

Pretty cool to see some of the "old timers" showing-up! Hard to believe how much time has gone by. Seeing join dates of 1999 is pretty crazy.

In a couple of months, DRN will be online for 19 continuous years, I would have never guessed it would still be here. Yeah, 5 years longer than Facebook, 7 years longer than Twitter. Needless to say, they grew a little more than we did, but hey, lol. DRN was the first modern era dirt bike "forum", while character-based bulletin boards were still the norm ( rec.motorcycles.dirt :).

We've celebrated members having kids and now those kids are grown. Friendships made. We saw members get married. We've seen folks go through tough times and come out on the other side. We've mourned when members passed. It really was just like a big family with all the good and bad that brings.

After all these years, the internet left us behind. Social media took-off, the mags started paying attention to the web (some shouldn't have), venture capitalized sites, etc., and our moderated forum fell out of favor with new generations of riders. It's a world of knowledge in 140 characters. The world changed. We didn't, for better or worse.

Folks would get pissed when we wouldn't let them trash the place-up with language and/or negative/destructive tirades. We did the best we could to make DRN a place for everyone including kids. We weren't going to be responsible for exposing young new riders to the negative side of the internet. There was no way we were going to be just another forum for people to trash each other, troll or spew a bunch of bad info in their quest to be a message board hero. In the end, that's a big part of DRN's fall from the biggest, to where we are now; a 150,000 page archive of useful dirt bike info.

We never collected user info to sell, we never sold email addresses, we didn't use the forum as a customer pool for an online store. We just wanted to provide a place for folks to hang out and talk about the sport we loved. Yeah, advertising had to happen, there's got to be revenue to pay the costs of operating the site. While it's against the ad agreement to discuss earnings, I can tell you that the ads cover the monthly server/bandwidth costs, barely. Add in software/development costs (not to mention man-hours) and tax (on ad revenue) and it's been a break even thing at best. But it's been worth it. Every bit of it. As long as I can afford to maintain it, it'll be here.

As they say, if you aren't continually trying to expand or evolve it, it dies. That may be true, but we never compromised, we weren't in it for the money and it was exactly what we wanted it to be.

Been a member since 2000, Didn't post much but was on here a lot back in the day. Started to raised a family, moved to drag racing and restoring muscle cars, bought a yamaha warrior then raider and rode street for several years.

Just bought a wr450 excited to get back into riding but my body will say otherwise.

I remember battle of admins and having contest with Thump at badlands and Dave, someone nicknamed me "Pit sally" and we had a bunch of edited photos making fun of each other. Good times